Acrylic Landscape: Paint Simple and Loose Using A Limited Color Palette

1. Introduction: Hi, everybody. My name is Aliyah and I'm an artist here in San Jose, California. Welcome to my painting class where I'm going to be teaching you how to paint a loose acrylic landscape using a reference photo. I'm going to walk you through everything that you need step-by-step. Today's reference is a simple landscape, but I'm going to show you how you can spice things up and add your own touch to it while still using a limited color palette. We're going to go through all the materials that you will need; brush techniques, dimension and form, and color mixing. We will then sketch the painting, and then finally, we'll paint this loose landscape, step-by-step in today's class project. It is going to surprise you how easy it can be once you understand brush application and techniques. Let's dive right in. To shop my art and merchandise, do visit my website where I sell all my original landscapes and photos, art prints, and a lot of variety and merch that includes phone cases and mugs, and much more arrivals to come soon. To keep up with latest news, do follow me on Instagram where you can stay up to date with my new launches. I love connecting and making new friends, so stop over, DM me, and say hi. I hope you're excited and let's begin today's feeling. 2. Materials: This is all the materials that you will need. These are the limited color palettes that I've chosen for today. Everything is listed in the description. As far as the brushes, we have two flat brushes, one big and one small, and two full board brushes, and one long detailed thin brush. You will also need some pencil or anything that you want to sketch with. A bowl for water, some scraper and an palette, I use a glass scraper. Then for my paper, I've used acrylic Strathmore paper. I cut mine into a five by seven inch. I do prime my canvas beforehand, so I use Gesso for that. I also use a gel medium to thicken up my paint. Again, I explain this in detail once I use it. This is optional, you don't have to use it, but it's good to have. Lastly, you'll need some tape to tape off your edges. I like using this artist's tape. Again, everything is listed in the Projects and Resources tab below. Also really important, make sure you print out the reference that I've provided down below. It is in the Projects and Resources tab below so make sure you right-click, save the image and you can pull it up beside you while you paint or watch this video. 3. Brushwork : Now, let's dive right into some brushwork. I'm going to walk you through the different strokes and marks that you can make from the brushes that I have used in today's class project. That way, you can see how these brush marks have been applied in today's landscape. Let's first begin with the flat brush. This one is super basic and clean. I use this one for the sky and you can get simple flat washes with this one, but extremely thin lines if you use the tip of it as well. Only the smaller flat brush works just the same. I use this for simple flat washes for my landscape, especially when I block off colors in the first step. Like mentioned, these next two brushes are my most used and amongst my favorite to paint landscapes. They are very versatile and are great for that loose style landscape paintings which we love. You can give really great, clean, flat strokes with this. I love painting this when I am painting huge mountains or just to block in shapes. I love using this brush to block in the initial stages. This brush is also great for leaving paint on top of one another as well. If you change the direction of the brush and hold it vertically, you can get arch-like shapes that can be used for bushes, trees, and loose objects. Because of the brush's arch-like shape, it is great for bushes and hence really great for landscapes. Using the side of the brush or its tip can also be very useful to pain far away trees or houses, etc. Overall, it's just really great for detailing. The smaller size full brow brush is great for smaller bushes and objects far away. I use this long, thin brush in every single painting, which I mostly bring up at the end for detailing. Whether I'm painting florals or landscapes, I always bring this out at the end. This brush can really add some visual interest with just little tiny marks. Today's painting, I used this brush for the grass. I gave it some highlights and just little tiny marks far away. This can really also signify and give impressions of little objects far away, maybe even houses or animals. I even actually signed my art with this brush. If you were wondering how I sign them, it's always with this brush at the very end. 4. Dimension & Form: In this lesson I'm going to go over dimension and form. A form is a three-dimensional figure as opposed to a shape being flat. How would you add a form to an object? Well, in painting, you can do that by adding color. In this example here we have dark tones, mid tones, light tones, and highlights. This is exactly what you need to turn a flat object and give it some dimension and form and I'm going to show you how. I'll be using red, black, and white to demonstrate this. First I'm going to block in the shape with just plain red so that we can have a base to start from. This right here is an example of a flat 2D object which we will now turn into a three-dimensional shape. Now, I'm going to start adding in my mid tones. I'm going to add some black and white to the red to create that. To get my dark tones, I'm going to add some more black and fill in that edge. Now we're going to take these two colors and blend them in between. You can already see how this is forming a shape. Now let's add in some light tones by mixing in some white. Notice how I'm painting in the direction of the ball. I'm not just painting this up and down since this is a round shape, you want to paint in that curve. I'm just going to go back and forth in between my dark tones, mid tones and light tones until I'm satisfied and I feel that this looks good. Here, I am just giving it a rough background so that it doesn't feel like this is just floating around. Then for the highlight I'm going to take a lot more white and a tiny dab of red. A quick recap. Dark tones are achieved by mixing your original color with some black and then the more white you mix in, you will get a gradient. You can see how you can move from a dark tone to a mid tone to light tones and then your highlights. 5. Color Study: Before we begin, let's go over our limited color palette for today and swatch some of those colors out to see what we are going to be playing with. I've got some white and black here with our four main colors that we will be trying out today. Let's start with brown sienna and some white. You get this really beautiful blush or the tone that is very useful in landscapes. One of my favorites to play with. Then mixing it with some black can give you a lovely deep burgundy color. Then mixing these two colors in between will give you a gorgeous mid-tone. Here you can see how really your colors can be using just one color with white and black. Having a limited color palette can really enrich your painting, making it look a lot more mature in some ways because it is considered to be more challenging to use only a few paints while still achieving the right feel and look. So I would highly recommend mixing your color palettes here before you begin to get a feel of what you've got and the direction of how your painting can look. I will be keeping this swatch as a reference beside me while I paint so you can see how all these colors and much more of these will be applied in today's painting. Colors we've swashed out so far are brown sienna, raw sienna, olive green, and teal blue. For the sky and the water, I will only be using the tiniest bit of teal blue and a lot more white. I'm going to be adding in just a smudge of black to give it that light grayish feel. I also sometimes like adding a bit of olive green with this mixture. It just adds a really nice tone to the sky and landscape overall. 6. Sketching Landscape: Now it's time to sketch out our landscape before we begin painting. I'm using a colored pencil so you all can see better, but you can use whatever you'd like. This landscape is fairly easy to sketch out because it has very limited shapes. Again, make sure to check the projects and resources tab below where you can save this image to use as your reference. You can just pull it up aside while you're painting and also pull it up as a reference while you watch this video, it's a more close-up of a peak. You can sketch out how much ever information you would like, but try not to be too detailed, but only block off your shapes based on color differences. Obviously, there's this big portion of land in the front. Then there's the little lake in the middle and then we have those two mountains. You can see two mountains clearly, but there's also a far away mountain in the back which I'm going to roughly draw out. Then there's this tree, like bush, off to the right corner which I'm also going to be sketching out. 7. Painting Process 1 - Blocking In: One of my secrets and tips in forming more texture in your paintings is to use a gel medium. This thickens up your paint while also not changing the color of your paint. You can use the tiniest amount of paint and use this gel medium to increase the quantity of it as well. It helps you save paint in the long run. Let's begin with the sky first. I'm taking in a flat brush and using tons of white with a smudge of Thalo blue and black. I'm going to be using this gel medium a bit as well. As you can see, it only thickens up the paint and adds a beautiful texture to your painting. I'm going to keep this nice and simple. To start with, a plain flat wash will do. To add a bit of definition, I'm going to add some more black to this and just make flat strokes to certain areas. We will come back to the sky later on, but for now, this is good. The same exact color is added to the lake portion. Again, this is the initial blocking off stage, so a flat wash will do for now. Now moving on to the fun parts. Let's begin with the mountains in the back. For my base layer, I'm just going to be using raw sienna to fill up the front mountain. I'm using a Filbert brush. If you've taken any of my other classes, you will know that I absolutely love this brush and it is my go-to brush for landscapes. All the brushes and materials are listed in the Projects and Resources tab below, if you need to check out. The one behind it, I'm going to be mixing in a bit of burnt sienna and raw sienna together. Adding a bit of black to the burnt sienna will deepen some of that color and it'll be great for the faraway mountains in the back. If you add some white to that, it'll give it that hazy faraway look. For your initial blocking off stage, it doesn't really matter what color you use exactly because you don't really have to match anything exactly at this point. Use this stage to simply block off your colors and we will slowly build up the layers little by little. Just find the color that you see most in that section and that is your base color. Use that color to block off the entire shape. Then the next stage will just be adding and building layers on top of that. Last thing to block off is the tree to the right. I'm using my Filbert brush again, but this time it's a little bit bigger than the one I used in the mountain. I keep saying olive oil, you guys, it's olive green. But I'm using olive green and a little bit of black and just making horizontal and vertical strokes at the same time. Keep switching your direction of the brush and fill that little tree section out. 8. Painting Process 2 - Secondary layers: If you look at the reference picture we've got here, there are a few queen beds to the foreground along with a bunch of other colors, which you'll get into later on. But for now, I'm just going to be laying out that olive green and white In the foreground, we're just applying a simple stroke. Keep in mind to hold your brush from the back to keep this painting loose. Remember these are loose-style paintings. This is just a great tip to keep in mind if you want to achieve that very loose abstract impressionist painting. Also, keep in mind to constantly use different sides to your brushes well as different directions. When I say size, I mean using the tip of the brush, the belly of the brush, and the side of the brush are all good variations. Along with having some strokes that are vertical and some that are horizontal. You want to keep switching the directions. That's very important because it will make your painting look more interesting, and it'll just give it more definition instead of looking super flat. If you just go in one direction everywhere, it's going to end up looking only flat. As long as you keep these tips in mind, it will make your painting stand out from an amateur piece to a more experienced one. Here you see me adding some black and olive green to some of the dark bits I see overall. Just make it your own, you don't have to copy the picture exactly. In fact, you can see me going totally astray from the reference. I'm just going to play around with a bunch of beautiful colors and a lot of earthy fall colors, especially since I'm totally in the fall mood right now. But you'll see me adding a bunch of colors side-by-side, just because I think they look nice together. Use this as a reference, solely as a reference. You don't have to copy it exactly. You can if you want to, of course, but also play with it. If you feel like the picture has just not that many colors, or if it's a little bit boring, you definitely can make it your own and spice it up a little bit. Fun fact, if you are wondering where this reference is taken from, it is actually a picture taken by me in Scotland. I had traveled to Scotland and the UK a couple of years back, this is pre-COVID times. Where traveling was a lot more fun and not restrained, let's put it that way. We were actually on a tour bus traveling to some really scenic destination and this was on the way to that place. Yeah, this was taken from the bus looking outside the window. Here I'm just tackling in some of those foggy, cloudy areas, and the faraway mountains by adding some white and black to those little sections. Also, don't be afraid of making your brush marks bold and confident. Increase the thickness to some of them while making much thinner strokes to others. But be intentional in your placement of each brush mark. Look at the composition and look at the juxtaposition of the colors next to it to see if it makes sense there. The colors around it should look nice together, is what I'm trying to get at. Play around with your limited color palette as much as you'd like, but make sure that it is intentional and that it has a purpose. 9. Painting Process 3 - Building Layers: I do see some underlying blush pink tones to the foreground, but I'm going to be exaggerating that color a little bit more. Just because I think it's a beautiful color and it will look really nice with the colors in this painting. So taking some burnt sienna and white, I'm going to add some strokes in different directions to the foreground. I'm going to add one brush stroke to the mountain here as well, just to balance off the colors. I'm just loving the texture that this painting has already, it looks even better in person. I don't know how much you can see through this video. I'm using some mint olive cream here to add some impressions of grass. Let's define this tree a little bit more by giving it some extra shape. I'm just making it a little bit taller and just adding some side leaves and branches to it. I'm using the side and the front of my Filbert brush to simply dab on it very gently. 10. Painting Process 4 - Defining Details: At this point you will see me going back and forth with a bunch of colors until I'm satisfied with the way things look, so adding some more darks and lights to certain areas. I wanted to brighten up this painting some more so I wanted to add some highlight color with a softer beige tint, so I'm taking in raw sienna and a lot of white to get that. The areas in the reference pic where I see like it's a bit more light, I'm adding this beige stroke to that. But I hope you can see how building on layers while keeping colors and direction on brush marks aligned can add dimension to me in loose painting. From basic flat strokes we started with in the initial block off stage to smaller defined brush marks and layers. Adding darks to your painting cannot only simplify your colors and just break up some of the shapes, but also it can add a nice pop to your painting. 11. Final Touches & Class Project: Going back to the water, I'm going to keep it really simple and just plain white. Just large big strokes in the center to separate that and define the lake a little bit. At the same time, I'm also going to be adding some white and some really nice little strokes to the sky as impressions of clouds. Just adding a bit of a darker gray to the corner of the sky just to somewhat define the clouds a little bit more. We're almost nearing the end here. I'm pulling out my final detail brush to touch things up here and there. Doing a little negative painting here and adding some gaps to the tree. Highlighting that beige tone a bit more. I'm bringing raw sienna and tons of white and going over the sections again. I felt the painting was missing that rust color we see in the reference, so I wanted to bring that out with brown sienna, raw sienna, and white. Adding my last final greens to the painting and we are done. Let's take off this tape and see what we've got. To cover up some of the pain marks that may have bled through the edges, do not worry, just use white paint or even better, just a primer to cover that up. This completes our loose acrylic landscape for today. I think this turned out pretty well and I cannot wait to see what you guys come up with. Share your projects. I would love to see them and do not forget to leave this class a review. If you've enjoyed this class, make sure to follow me so that you do not miss out on future painting classes from me. Follow this class up with my latest acrylic painting class following a reference as well. If you like copying from a reference exact, then you will love this next one because this is a bit more detailed. Make sure that you complete this existing class first before moving onto this next one. Thank you once again and happy painting. To shop my art and merchandise, do visit my website where I sell all my original landscapes and florals, art prints in a lot of variety, and much that includes phone cases and mugs and much more items to come soon. To keep up with latest news, do follow me on Instagram where you can stay up to date with my new launches. I love connecting and making new friends. Stop over DM, me and say hi.